The PowWow

Jacob drove, which told you everything about the state of me — I let Jacob drive, folded into the passenger seat of my own life for once, and I didn't even make the usual joke about him operating a vehicle like a man trying to escape one.

I was somewhere else. I was back in Rachel's living room, running the tape, because that's what my mind does now that it was running clean again — it goes back over the ground I covered blind and shows me what I walked past. All the mental filing, what hadn’t truly been eaten by the black hole before its destruction was finally being used again.

And about six blocks out, it stopped on something.

She moved her legs.

In the chair. Near the end, when she took a firmer grip on my hand — she'd shifted her legs. I'd half-seen it and filed it in the good drawer without looking, the way I'd filed the straightness of her spine, the ease of the chair, the movements that were costing her nothing they'd have cost her three months ago. I sat up in the passenger seat. She sat up straighter, too — weeks ago, the day the case landed, I watched her spine do the old thing and I thought it was just posture. Sat up straighter. Moved her legs. Two facts, filed separately, in a drawer I'd stopped opening, and my mind laid them side by side now and started to do arithmetic that made my heart come up into my throat —

"We're here," Jacob said.

And the arithmetic had to wait, because the gallery on Sixth was in front of us with its lights low, and a man inside it needed freeing, and some sums you don't get to finish before the next thing.

Later, I told myself. And meant it, this time, at a mathematically impossible one thousand percent. Later, I chase that all the way down. 

Silas had let us in himself. No opening tonight, no crush of admirers — just the man and his work and the low after-hours light, which suited what we'd come to do. He'd been delighted by the call. The men who see, he'd said. He thought we were coming to be dazzled again.

I felt the art the second we walked in, the seam under the beauty, the pull — and then I felt something I hadn't expected, which was how much less it pulled than it had the first time. It reached for me and found the line tied off. Three weeks ago I'd stood in this room half-open to it; tonight I'd knelt on a floor and pointed my whole self back up and out where it belonged, and the counterfeit slid off me the way it slid off Rachel, mostly, and I understood in my own body what Jeremiah had meant. You can't fold a man whose far end is fixed to the rock.

Jacob felt none of it, because the rock of Christ was where his rope was firmly anchored. He walked into the center of the room, among the canvases, and he waited for me, and we put it to Silas straight.

I did the diagnosis, because I'd been the one who read him. I laid it out plain — the collectors coming apart at the edges, the marriages gone cold, the shelter closed, the dropped coffee no one bent for, the whole city standing in front of the most beautiful thing it had ever seen and getting colder. I told him what actually lived in his work. That it desensitized. That it turned a person's worship inward and taught them to stop there. That it was transcendence with the center cut out — every holy scene he'd ever painted, gorgeous, and hollow exactly where God should be.

"You paint the garden," I said, "and you cut out the Lord walking in it. You paint the manger and you cut out the light of the Lord. You give people the shape of the sacred with the sacred scooped out, and you fill the hole with them. And they can't stop looking, because you've built them a mirror and told them it's a window."

He fought.

Of course he fought. I'd have been disappointed if he hadn't — the whole armory came out, and he wielded it well, because he'd been wielding it his whole life. The muse, first — I don't control what comes, I'm only the hand, you're blaming the brush for the painting. Then the freedom of the artist — art isn't a sermon, it's not supposed to instruct, you're asking me to hang a Sunday-school poster and call it a gift, the whole point is that it's free. Then, when those didn't move us, the big one, the last one, the one with real heat behind it — it's divine inspiration. It's holy. It came through me from somewhere holy and I will not stand in my own gallery and let two men tell me the thing that saved my life is corrupt. 

And right there, on the word holy, for just a second — something looked out of him that wasn't him.

I caught it because I wasn’t a prisoner of an idol anymore. A flatness behind the eyes, a borrowed quality to the heat, the same draft I'd felt pass through Roiya's scoff across a couch. It used Silas's mouth and it was gone, and Silas didn't feel it come or go, because Silas had never once suspected there was anyone in the room but him and his gift. I filed it — in the good drawer, in the light, where I could find it again. He's here. Or his hand is. Watching this too. 

But we hadn't come to fight the hand. We'd come for the man.

So we answered him the only way that has ever, in the whole history of my family, actually worked. We didn't argue him down. We brought him the Word, and we brought it gently, and we let it do what it does.

Jacob went first, because Silas’ gift was so obviously God-given. Jacob didn't deny the gift — that was the thing Silas braced for and never got. Jacob affirmed it. The gift is real, he said. It came from God. We are not here to tell you it did not. And I watched that land on Silas sideways, disarm him, because he'd built his whole defense to protect the gift and here were the two men who'd come to agree it was holy.

"'There are diversities of gifts,'" Jacob said, low and certain, the words coming out of him the way scripture always did, like he was reading them off the inside of his own ribs, "'but the same Spirit.' Paul. To the Corinthians. Every gift given by the one Spirit — and given, he says, 'to profit withal.' For the common good. Not for the one who carries it." He let it sit. "'Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us.' Romans. The gift is grace, Silas. A thing handed down. You did not make it. You received it. And a thing you received is a stewardship, not a possession — 'as every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards.' Peter. You are a steward of it. Not its owner. Not its object."

"Then what's it for," Silas said, and there was something raw starting under the polish now, the first hairline. "If it isn't mine, what am I supposed to—"

"'Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,'" Jacob said, "'do all to the glory of God.' That is what it is for. Every gift, all the way down, aimed at the same place — up. Toward the One who gave it. You took a gift meant to turn a whole city's eyes toward God, and you turned it back on yourself, and you didn't do it out of malice. You did it because somewhere you decided the gift was the only thing about you worth looking at." His voice gentled, and the whole granite weight of him came down soft. "That is the corruption. Not the gift. The direction."

The polish was coming off him in sheets now. And that's when I stepped in, because the direction was Jacob's to correct, but the starving thing under it — that was the one I'd seen the first night, and it was mine.

"You don't believe you're worth anything without it," I said.

He went still.

"I read people, Silas. It's my whole gift, the same way paint is yours, and I read you the first night, at your own opening, glowing in the middle of a crowd that loved you. And under all of it — the grants, the Geneva collector, the muse, the whole beautiful show — there's a man who is starving to death, because somewhere a long time ago you decided that Silas Auren the person was nothing, and Silas Auren the gift was everything, so you poured the whole person into the gift until there was no one left over. And then you made the gift about you, because if the gift ever pointed away from you — up, where it belongs — you were afraid there'd be nothing standing where you'd been. Just an empty coat."

His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"That's why God's not in the paintings," I said, softer. "It was never sophistication. You couldn't put Him in the center because you'd hollowed the center out and moved in yourself, and if you let Him have it back, you didn't know what would be left of you. I know. I just spent three months doing the exact same thing with a wall and a dead man's name. I hollowed out my own center and moved a hunt into it, because the hunt felt like something and I'd stopped believing I was anything without it. I know the shape of your house, Silas. I've been living in one just like it."

The last of the polish fell off. What was under it was a face I'd seen the shape of that first night and not the whole of — the self-loathing the flamboyance had been built brick by brick to cover, out in the open now, terrible and naked, a man looking at the empty middle of himself for the first time with the lights on.

"Then there's nothing," he whispered. "If it's not mine. If it's not — me. There's nothing there."

"No," Jacob said.

And he quoted the Word.

"'The LORD seeth not as man seeth,'" he said, "'for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.' Samuel. He is not fooled by the show, Silas. He never was. He has been looking past it this whole time, at the part of you you buried — and He does not find nothing there." He turned a few pages, unhurried. "'I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.' You were made. Before a single canvas. Fearfully. Wonderfully. Known and formed and named by God before you ever picked up a brush, and worth all of it then, with no gift in your hands at all. Your worth was never the gift. The gift was only ever meant to say thank You to the One who made something worth so much He'd knit it together in the dark on purpose. You've had it backwards your whole life. You thought the gift was where your worth lived. It was only ever meant to be where your worship went."

Silas Auren came apart.

Not gracefully — the load-bearing wall never comes down gracefully, and his whole self had been load-bearing. He went down, actually down, onto the polished concrete of his own gallery in the low after-hours light, surrounded by a hundred gorgeous hollow images of a world with God cut out of it, and he wept the way a building weeps when the thing holding it up finally lets go — total, and structural, and, underneath the wreck of it, something almost like relief.

And through it, ragged, half-formed, the first true sentence I'd heard him say:

"It was never mine to be worshipped with."

He looked up at us, wrecked and emptied and, for the first time since I'd met him, actually there — a real man at the bottom of himself, with the lights on, and Someone finally in the center.

"It was mine to serve with," he said. "Wasn't it."

"Yeah," I said. "It was. Even better, it still is."